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Title: We Could Be Heroes
Ff.net penname: PineappleGrenade

Category your story fits under: Batman Begins/Dark Knight
Genre: Crime/Suspense
Status: In progress
Rating: T

Disclaimer: I do not own Batman, nor do I profit from the countless hours I spend writing about him.

Summary: Gotham, the city that never sleeps because it is afraid of nightmares. One man has taken it upon himself to protect Gotham from her nightmares, but he can't even save himself from his own; the nightmare that wears the face of a clown.

Teaser:

A wild scatty rhythm of saxophones and trumpets filled the air of the small room with a riot of sound, blending with the erratic tap-tap of an underlying drumbeat. Caterwauling cacophony up and down the scales, leaping between key changes with the ease of giants traversing mountain ranges. Staccato bursts of trumpet notes that assaulted the ears and then continued to rock them, pounding through the canals and arteries that made up the brain until they were trembling under the attack, left to the mercy of the music’s might. All the rules were made to be broken, to be crushed under each and every golden note. Boundaries were chewed up and redefined in the majesty of that noise. All this and more was jazz and the Joker loved it.

He sat sprawled on the broken springs of a beaten, crooked armchair in his beaten, crooked apartment room with his head thrown back and his eyes closed. He breathed in the music, bathed in it and it didn’t matter that it came crackling through a tinny set of cheap speakers because in his head it reverberated like the acoustics in the finest music hall. The lack of form and unpredictable measure suited him perfectly; it made sense to his way of thinking.

The song drew, after what felt like a lifetime but had only really been three minutes, to a close and the smoke-roughened voice of the radio deejay announced that there would be some more “sexy” jazz tunes to come after the travel update. Joker slowly opened his eyes and was mildly surprised to find himself still in his flat, an eyrie perched high above the streets of Gotham. Turning his head, he could look out of the grimy window and see the jagged skyline of the city silhouetted against the bloody red of a setting sun.

A smooth female voice on the radio informed him that there had been a crash on 43rd Street and it was recommended that drivers find an alternative route home because traffic in that area had slowed to a crawl. Joker thought about getting out of Gotham. There’d been a suicide attempt on the underground, so the trains would be running late, but there were plenty of other cities with suicides on the tracks. A little vacation could be just what the doctor ordered.